MIT Professor to Deliver Katz Chemical Engineering Lecture March 15

March 9, 2010

MIT Professor to Deliver Katz Chemical Engineering Lecture March 15

Professor Arup Chakraborty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Arup Chakraborty, Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will deliver the Annual Katz Lecture in Chemical Engineering at The City College of New York (CCNY) 2 p.m. Monday, March 15, in the Steinman Hall auditorium. His topic will be “Understanding Adaptive Immunity: A Crossroad of the Physical, Life, and Engineering Sciences.”

A faculty member at MIT since 2005, Professor Chakraborty was previously at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware and did postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota.

In addition, Professor Chakraborty is a founding member of the Ragon Institute of MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard University. The Ragon Institute, officially established in February 2009 and supported by the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Foundation, creates a singular opportunity and environment to engage scientists, engineers and clinicians in challenging medical research.

The central theme of his research over the past 10 years has been the development and application of theoretical/computational approaches to study how T lymphocytes, orchestrators of the adaptive immune response, function. His work at the interface of the physical, life, and engineering sciences has been recognized by many honors. They include a National Institutes Health Director’s Pioneer Award, the E.O. Lawrence Memorial Award for Life Sciences, the Allan P. Colburn and Professional Progress Awards of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, a Miller Research Professorship and a National Young Investigator Award.

About the Katz Lecture
A special lecture by a distinguished expert is given each year in the memory of Professor Stanley Katz, who was a faculty member at CCNY from 1963 to 1971. Professor Katz was born in New York and was a graduate of The City College in the Department of Mathematics. He later obtained a Ph.D. at the Courant Institute in New York. He worked for many years in the chemical industry, first at Hydrocarbon Research and later at American Cyanamid, as a mathematical consultant. He made significant contributions to chemical engineering literature, especially in optimization and control theory. He continued his research at The City College and was admired and appreciated by his students and colleagues as a brilliant teacher and, above all, as a warm, wonderful human being. The Stanley Katz annual lecture is an unusual event made possible by the Stanley Katz Memorial Fund contributed to by his friends and colleagues.